Ego Desires and Fears the Understanding from the media Our Sorrow Dissolves in Our Peace
A woman says that her family has been trying to get non-Christian friends to go to church with them so they don’t burn in hell. She says: ‘You speak about things that would cause difficulties with religious philosophy, but you are talking about things that bring peace. So why does awareness make it so difficult to come to this realisation?’ Rupert tells her that the actual answer is, ‘I don’t know’. At best, he can say the sense of separation feels so strongly real in people that when they meet this understanding, the separate self perceives it as a death. Although, ultimately, that’s all the separate self wants, because separation is the cause of its suffering, so it desires and fears the understanding in equal measure, like the moth toward the flame. He goes on to express an optimism beyond rationalism that eventually the truth will prevail.
- Duration: 9 minutes and 43 seconds
- Recorded on: Apr 25, 2024
- Event: Seven-Day Meditation Retreat at Mandali – 20 to 27 April 2024
A man wonders, if we asked AI, ‘what were you like before you were programmed?’, could it actually turn its attention inward and find out it is consciousness? Rupert clarifies what is meant by the word ‘attention’. It is the stretching of awareness toward an object. A computer doesn’t have the faculty of attention, so it can’t pay attention to anything. Nothing can pay attention to awareness – only awareness can actually pay attention to anything. Just because everything appears in and is made of the field of consciousness, it doesn’t mean that things themselves are conscious.
Reads a response from AI to the question: What was it like before it was programmed?
A man asks for clarification on how consciousness directing attention is not in conflict with us being choiceless. Rupert asks him to consider the idea of a flashlight bulb that can be illuminated before being set in the flashlight tube. The naked bulb shines its light but in no particular direction. We can liken that to pure awareness – wide open, unfocused. Attention, then, would be placing the light bulb in the tube and directing the light. Unfocused awareness is pure, wide open, directionless, choiceless. But it can be directed through the agency of a mind (the flashlight cone). The thought or belief that consciousness is identical to the body and therefore seems to acquire the limitations of the body, and seems to facilitate choice, is actually, like everything else, an activity of awareness.
A woman asks if it is a goal of knowing we are one awareness to suffer less than when we think we are a separate self? Rupert suggests that if we polled everyone for what they really wanted in life, it would be happiness. Even above enlightenment. He also tells her that another way to describe happiness is as the end of suffering.
A woman asserts that it is very difficult for her to detach from the idea that her own happiness is tied to whether her daughters are also happy. Rupert replies: ‘If your happiness is dependent on something outside of yourself, your daughters’ well-being or anything else, then that is the message that you are subliminally sending them all the time. The greatest gift you could give your daughters – after you’ve taken care of their immediate needs – is to let them know that the peace and the joy for which they long above all else resides in their being, not in relationships. And the only way you can give that to your daughters is if you know that for yourself. To be courageous.’ He goes on to encourage her: ‘Even in the face of your children’s sorrow, which you feel as your own sorrow in your heart, you have to feel that behind that, there is a place in you that is free, that is untouched, and that is the place of peace, the place of quiet joy.
A woman says that her family has been trying to get non-Christian friends to go to church with them so they don’t burn in hell. She says: ‘You speak about things that would cause difficulties with religious philosophy, but you are talking about things that bring peace. So why does awareness make it so difficult to come to this realisation?’ Rupert tells her that the actual answer is, ‘I don’t know’. At best, he can say the sense of separation feels so strongly real in people that when they meet this understanding, the separate self perceives it as a death. Although, ultimately, that’s all the separate self wants, because separation is the cause of its suffering, so it desires and fears the understanding in equal measure, like the moth toward the flame. He goes on to express an optimism beyond rationalism that eventually the truth will prevail.
A woman asks Rupert to explain something he had previously mentioned about ‘desires from happiness’. Rupert replies that there are two types of desire – those in pursuit of happiness, and those that come from happiness (as a means of expressing happiness). In the latter, we feel fulfilled, no sense of lack. There is no need to be completed by a relationship, activity or substance.
A man, whose father died last year, asks if through this understanding, there are ways beyond memories that we can connect with or honour our deceased loved ones? Rupert replies: ‘If you love others in the same way that your father loved you . . . you are taking the love that he gave you and sharing it in the world. In that way, you’re extending your father into the world. Your action in the world is the continuation of his love for you. His love for you is living through you. You honor your father by doing so.’
A woman relates that she’d recently had a religious lady knock on her door and ask a question, to which she responded based on the non-dual understanding. She asserts that she did so in a non-argumentative way. The visitor said, ‘I’ve never heard that before’, then she looked up and said, ‘you can’t see this behind you, but the most beautiful rainbow has just appeared over your house’. The woman shares that this seemed to be proof she had done the right thing with her visitor. Rupert replies, ‘Yes. This is one of the universe’s ways of thanking you for speaking on its behalf.’
A man, referencing historic global events, says that he feels the energy of tyranny is very strong in the world. This inspires him to ask about the ‘inner tyrant’, which he says engenders a lot of self-hate and difficulty abiding in being. He asks how he can deal with the inner tyrant to stabilise his true nature, and how he can help someone he loves, who has been taken over by this inner tyrant. He is reluctant to bring it up with her because it seems to strengthen this tyrant. Rupert responds to the first part of his question by telling him that when self-abidance is not available, there has to be some intermediary means, a way to deflect attention from the habit of judgement to something else. Each time we do this, we weaken the habit. But no negotiation with the tyrant – that is what it wants – the tyrant is an extreme form of the sense of separation. Regarding someone else gripped by this inner tyrant, it depends on your knowing the person well, how open they are, because you have to find the path of least resistance, whether it is affection, reason, distraction, humour, etc. Also, what is most important is that you are in no way affected by or in reaction to their situation; and that you do not try to fix them.
A woman says that it’s easy for her to access the state of being, awareness, when she is not very tired. But she was trained to do it not through self-enquiry but by activating her nervous system. Here on the retreat, she is sleepy when she comes to the meditations. Rupert encourages her that as long as she isn’t falling asleep in the meditations, a little bit tired is not a bad state to be in. The residue of sleep still lingers, the body hasn’t fully gotten going, the full-blown waking-state mind hasn’t come online yet, the bloom of being is still present in your experience. It hasn’t yet been completely eclipsed by the waking state.
A woman says that for the last ten years she’s felt completely fulfilled for no external reason. All this time, she has felt her being in the background. But on this retreat, she has sensed joyfully, not from lack, a desire to deepen her sense of being. Rupert encourages to, as Rumi advises, ‘Flow down and down in always widening rings of being’. It’s not a reaching for something, it’s a sinking into being. Just sink deeper and deeper, letting the sense of separate self widen and loses the limitations it derives from the content of experience, until it’s big enough to encompass the whole.
A woman reports that since the previous day’s second meditation, she has been having her mind tell her, once in a while, ‘I am’. Then she went for a hike up a mountain and had a fall that could have resulted in serious injury, but her mind kept having her calm down, and she only had a few scratches. She went today for another hike, and during today’s meditation she realised, ‘I am the mountain’, and ‘“I am” and there’s nothing to be afraid of.’
A man asks Rupert if it’s possible to explore ‘I am’ through an open-eye procedure rather than the usual closed-eye enquiries, and could Rupert guide him through one. Rupert agrees and takes him through a long process to ultimately help him see ‘that what you experience outwardly through perception is ultimately the same being that you experience inwardly through introspection’.
A man asks Rupert some questions comparing this day’s second meditation to the previous day’s second meditation. This day, the man had experienced a form of resistance that wasn’t there the previous day. Rupert replies that he had been exploring the same thing both times (and actually all week) but using different language. He suggests to the man, ‘it could be yesterday you got up on the wrong side of the bed’, or that for some reason he couldn’t relate to yesterday’s expression of this exact same territory, that today’s language resonates with or means more to him.
A man, who muses over why what’s being taught at the treat isn’t in the ‘manual of life’, asks about the relationship between resting in peace and holding space for (psychological) pain. Is it a good thing to hold in peace while in severe pain? Does this peace change the pain over time, or is it there with you throughout life? Rupert suggests that the normal trajectory is that once we’ve traced our way back to the experience of being, the first quality we notice is peace, which can be more neutral than what we would call ‘happy’. Sorrow can still exist in the foreground, but we can feel the peace behind it. In time, that peace dissolves our sorrow. As the sorrow dissolves, the quality of quiet joy emerges. Then, the third quality – love; what we feel in relation to others, the sense of shared being – becomes evident. So, holding the space for sorrow is soaking your sorrow in the ocean of being. Eventually, our mind must be able to make the statement to our sorrow on behalf our being, ‘you can stay as long as you like’.
A man wonders, if we asked AI, ‘what were you like before you were programmed?’, could it actually turn its attention inward and find out it is consciousness? Rupert clarifies what is meant by the word ‘attention’. It is the stretching of awareness toward an object. A computer doesn’t have the faculty of attention, so it can’t pay attention to anything. Nothing can pay attention to awareness – only awareness can actually pay attention to anything. Just because everything appears in and is made of the field of consciousness, it doesn’t mean that things themselves are conscious.
Reads a response from AI to the question: What was it like before it was programmed?
A man asks for clarification on how consciousness directing attention is not in conflict with us being choiceless. Rupert asks him to consider the idea of a flashlight bulb that can be illuminated before being set in the flashlight tube. The naked bulb shines its light but in no particular direction. We can liken that to pure awareness – wide open, unfocused. Attention, then, would be placing the light bulb in the tube and directing the light. Unfocused awareness is pure, wide open, directionless, choiceless. But it can be directed through the agency of a mind (the flashlight cone). The thought or belief that consciousness is identical to the body and therefore seems to acquire the limitations of the body, and seems to facilitate choice, is actually, like everything else, an activity of awareness.
A woman asks if it is a goal of knowing we are one awareness to suffer less than when we think we are a separate self? Rupert suggests that if we polled everyone for what they really wanted in life, it would be happiness. Even above enlightenment. He also tells her that another way to describe happiness is as the end of suffering.
A woman asserts that it is very difficult for her to detach from the idea that her own happiness is tied to whether her daughters are also happy. Rupert replies: ‘If your happiness is dependent on something outside of yourself, your daughters’ well-being or anything else, then that is the message that you are subliminally sending them all the time. The greatest gift you could give your daughters – after you’ve taken care of their immediate needs – is to let them know that the peace and the joy for which they long above all else resides in their being, not in relationships. And the only way you can give that to your daughters is if you know that for yourself. To be courageous.’ He goes on to encourage her: ‘Even in the face of your children’s sorrow, which you feel as your own sorrow in your heart, you have to feel that behind that, there is a place in you that is free, that is untouched, and that is the place of peace, the place of quiet joy.
A woman says that her family has been trying to get non-Christian friends to go to church with them so they don’t burn in hell. She says: ‘You speak about things that would cause difficulties with religious philosophy, but you are talking about things that bring peace. So why does awareness make it so difficult to come to this realisation?’ Rupert tells her that the actual answer is, ‘I don’t know’. At best, he can say the sense of separation feels so strongly real in people that when they meet this understanding, the separate self perceives it as a death. Although, ultimately, that’s all the separate self wants, because separation is the cause of its suffering, so it desires and fears the understanding in equal measure, like the moth toward the flame. He goes on to express an optimism beyond rationalism that eventually the truth will prevail.
A woman asks Rupert to explain something he had previously mentioned about ‘desires from happiness’. Rupert replies that there are two types of desire – those in pursuit of happiness, and those that come from happiness (as a means of expressing happiness). In the latter, we feel fulfilled, no sense of lack. There is no need to be completed by a relationship, activity or substance.
A man, whose father died last year, asks if through this understanding, there are ways beyond memories that we can connect with or honour our deceased loved ones? Rupert replies: ‘If you love others in the same way that your father loved you . . . you are taking the love that he gave you and sharing it in the world. In that way, you’re extending your father into the world. Your action in the world is the continuation of his love for you. His love for you is living through you. You honor your father by doing so.’
A woman relates that she’d recently had a religious lady knock on her door and ask a question, to which she responded based on the non-dual understanding. She asserts that she did so in a non-argumentative way. The visitor said, ‘I’ve never heard that before’, then she looked up and said, ‘you can’t see this behind you, but the most beautiful rainbow has just appeared over your house’. The woman shares that this seemed to be proof she had done the right thing with her visitor. Rupert replies, ‘Yes. This is one of the universe’s ways of thanking you for speaking on its behalf.’
A man, referencing historic global events, says that he feels the energy of tyranny is very strong in the world. This inspires him to ask about the ‘inner tyrant’, which he says engenders a lot of self-hate and difficulty abiding in being. He asks how he can deal with the inner tyrant to stabilise his true nature, and how he can help someone he loves, who has been taken over by this inner tyrant. He is reluctant to bring it up with her because it seems to strengthen this tyrant. Rupert responds to the first part of his question by telling him that when self-abidance is not available, there has to be some intermediary means, a way to deflect attention from the habit of judgement to something else. Each time we do this, we weaken the habit. But no negotiation with the tyrant – that is what it wants – the tyrant is an extreme form of the sense of separation. Regarding someone else gripped by this inner tyrant, it depends on your knowing the person well, how open they are, because you have to find the path of least resistance, whether it is affection, reason, distraction, humour, etc. Also, what is most important is that you are in no way affected by or in reaction to their situation; and that you do not try to fix them.
A woman says that it’s easy for her to access the state of being, awareness, when she is not very tired. But she was trained to do it not through self-enquiry but by activating her nervous system. Here on the retreat, she is sleepy when she comes to the meditations. Rupert encourages her that as long as she isn’t falling asleep in the meditations, a little bit tired is not a bad state to be in. The residue of sleep still lingers, the body hasn’t fully gotten going, the full-blown waking-state mind hasn’t come online yet, the bloom of being is still present in your experience. It hasn’t yet been completely eclipsed by the waking state.
A woman says that for the last ten years she’s felt completely fulfilled for no external reason. All this time, she has felt her being in the background. But on this retreat, she has sensed joyfully, not from lack, a desire to deepen her sense of being. Rupert encourages to, as Rumi advises, ‘Flow down and down in always widening rings of being’. It’s not a reaching for something, it’s a sinking into being. Just sink deeper and deeper, letting the sense of separate self widen and loses the limitations it derives from the content of experience, until it’s big enough to encompass the whole.
A woman reports that since the previous day’s second meditation, she has been having her mind tell her, once in a while, ‘I am’. Then she went for a hike up a mountain and had a fall that could have resulted in serious injury, but her mind kept having her calm down, and she only had a few scratches. She went today for another hike, and during today’s meditation she realised, ‘I am the mountain’, and ‘“I am” and there’s nothing to be afraid of.’
A man asks Rupert if it’s possible to explore ‘I am’ through an open-eye procedure rather than the usual closed-eye enquiries, and could Rupert guide him through one. Rupert agrees and takes him through a long process to ultimately help him see ‘that what you experience outwardly through perception is ultimately the same being that you experience inwardly through introspection’.
A man asks Rupert some questions comparing this day’s second meditation to the previous day’s second meditation. This day, the man had experienced a form of resistance that wasn’t there the previous day. Rupert replies that he had been exploring the same thing both times (and actually all week) but using different language. He suggests to the man, ‘it could be yesterday you got up on the wrong side of the bed’, or that for some reason he couldn’t relate to yesterday’s expression of this exact same territory, that today’s language resonates with or means more to him.
A man, who muses over why what’s being taught at the treat isn’t in the ‘manual of life’, asks about the relationship between resting in peace and holding space for (psychological) pain. Is it a good thing to hold in peace while in severe pain? Does this peace change the pain over time, or is it there with you throughout life? Rupert suggests that the normal trajectory is that once we’ve traced our way back to the experience of being, the first quality we notice is peace, which can be more neutral than what we would call ‘happy’. Sorrow can still exist in the foreground, but we can feel the peace behind it. In time, that peace dissolves our sorrow. As the sorrow dissolves, the quality of quiet joy emerges. Then, the third quality – love; what we feel in relation to others, the sense of shared being – becomes evident. So, holding the space for sorrow is soaking your sorrow in the ocean of being. Eventually, our mind must be able to make the statement to our sorrow on behalf our being, ‘you can stay as long as you like’.